Read by Steve Wedd
She was so thin she seemed to slip through doors like a credit card. She was the FACE, she was the front cover of VOGUE, she was the canvas for REVLON, the dress horse for GUCCI. She wasn't just a model, she was an UBERMODEL; and all the catwalks of all the global capitals, laid end to end were the conveyor of her life. Everyone wanted a part of her and she could have a part of anything she wanted.
So it was curious that her most treasured possession was a plastic snowstorm her father gave her when she was three. It was the tacky plastic kind that offered flurries of synthetic flakes when it was shaken.
And here she was on the first morning of London Fashion Week, sat on the edge of her bed, holding it in her spidery fingers, watching the snow settle past the badly painted snowman and the fir tree.
Her boyfriend, Alfredo, a swarthy Spanish photographer and sometime racing driver, sat on the other side snorting coke off his sunglasses with a rolled up twenty pound note.
"You want some?" he said.
She shook her head and went over to her dressing table and put the snowstorm down beside her.
And there she looked into the mirror and tried to wipe away the darkness under her eyes, though she knew that darkness wouldn't wipe away. And so she applied the foundation, slowly, surely, until her aquamarine eyes achieved the shell of beauty that had sold ten thousand handbags, a million bottles of perfume.
And as she dragged the pad down the side of her cheeks some thing strange happened. She felt her face slip. Not her skin, not the fine downy hairs upon that skin, but her whole face, sliding down beneath her hand like the top card on a poker deck; and for a brief terrible moment there was a black gap between the top of her eyebrows and the bottom of her furrowed brow. She pushed her face back up again and the gap closed with a clunk. She turned around to see if Alfredo had noticed but he was rubbing the remains of the coke into his gums.
So she adjusted her hair, sprayed on some Eau de Toilette, pulled on her jeans and baggy top and left with a halfhearted kiss into the air like she was puffing on an absent cigarette.
*
Four hours later she was striding down the catwalk in a red satin dress that fitted her so well it was like Clingfilm, one sure, poised, foot in front of the other. And it was then, as she approached the end of the platform, shifting the centre of balance onto her back foot as she prepared to turn, that her face fell off. It slid clear away from the back of her skull and onto the floor of the catwalk, staring back up at her like a Venetian mask. She tripped over it as she turned and ended up on her back on the floor. The model behind had no time to stop and her stiletto shoe stomped into the empty hole in her head where her face had once been. The model tried to remove her shoe but succeeded only in extricating her foot so the red stiletto remained pinned into the cavity in the skull.
Somewhat unsteadily she got up, with the red stiletto protruding from the vault in her head like a grotesque nose and she walked to the edge of the stage. Strangely, although her face had sheared clear away from the rest of her scalp, she could still see from its cavity and out into the crowd.
She saw Alfredo sat with the others in the front row, jaw wide open. She staggered down the steps to where he was and stood over him with her arms outstretched as if pleading for help. He reached up and pulled out the red stiletto with a squelching sound and as he did so a storm of white powder emerged from the vent in her face, coughing out in waves, like the output of a snow machine at a ski resort. Except it wasn't snow, it was cocaine. And the ranks of beloved celebrities and designers and Russian hoodlums and the photographers sucked it in with widening pupils as they sneezed and laughed.
*
Two weeks later her father went to her flat. She was now safely in a private hospital and they had given her so many sedative drugs she dribbled like a baby, but at least she wasn't going on about the non-existent hole in her face any more and sometimes, at least, she slept.
He packed a few of her clothes and belongings into a cardboard box and it was then he found the plastic snowstorm on the dressing table. He remembered when he had given it to her all those years ago, when she had been so disappointed that Christmas was over, when she couldn't bear it that the presents would be gone for another year and he had given her this thing and told her that the presents didn't have to be over, that there was still more she could have, and if she wanted it, if she really really wanted it, she could have the whole world.
Really? she had said.
Really, he had said.
And now he stood in this empty Notting Hill flat with the cold light playing across the mirror on the dressing table, watching the synthetic flakes settle to the painted frosted ground.
Inside there was a snowman and a fir tree and a little girl. Strange, he had never remembered the little girl; perhaps that was why she had liked it so.
He put the thing into the cardboard box and covered it with clothes and cosmetics. He didn't notice that the girl in the plastic snowstorm had her hands and face pressed against the plastic shell, her skin smeared, her features and eyes distorted, her mouth open, screaming.
"LET ME OUT."
--
The Snowstorm was read by Steve Wedd at the Liars' League Ghosts & Monsters event on Tuesday October 9th, 2007.
Josh McDonald has written a novel about furniture made out of living dogs called "Automatic Safe Dog" and a novella about comatose American women called "The Centrally Locked Mothers of America". His short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and he has told his tales all over the country in clubs, pubs, boats and lighthouses. He runs "Folk Tales" a much loved storytelling and music night in Bristol and writes songs and perfoms in the twisted folk band Jetfly. [email protected]
Steve Wedd is a veteran of Liars' League. As an actor he works largely in the corporate and voice fields, finding sweet release for some of his pent-up urges in cultural oases such as the Liars' League events.
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